


i don’t have a choice (but i’d still choose you)

by agentpolastri



Series: your hands can heal, your hands can bruise [1]
Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Kisses, Post S3, i’m sorry!!!!!, the twelve found them, they’re totally soulmates tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24637969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentpolastri/pseuds/agentpolastri
Summary: It’s the ending they didn’t want, but knew was coming anyways.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Series: your hands can heal, your hands can bruise [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781422
Comments: 11
Kudos: 72





	i don’t have a choice (but i’d still choose you)

“I think I’m tired,” Eve says while Villanelle tries to put her back into one piece. There is blood. Too much blood. There is probably a bit of sinew strung out on the floor, because by now, she knows what it looks like very, very well. Eve thinks that her life is leaking out through her turtleneck, on the ground, on Villanelle’s skin and smeared across her face in rusty crimson. She flickers in and out of existence as a ghostly image, a pale thing, a mere husk of the woman earlier in the day. 

She feels like a sunset. 

“I think that is understandable,” Villanelle speaks somewhere, and she sounds strange, like maybe she isn’t trying to piece Eve back together so much as she’s trying to desperately hold herself in this dire moment for the two of them. The footsteps are getting closer, now, stomping up the stairs of the building that they had taken refuge in as a sort of safe house. Time is running out, but which will come first? The cleaners, or the inevitable? 

“No,” Eve whispers, wheezes, exhales into loose vowels and consonants that are becoming increasingly disjointed. “I’m tired, Villanelle.” Her hand skitters across the floor loosely. She wonders how it’s still functioning—if it’s even still there, because phantom limbs can exist, right? But no, she feels a twisted finger nudge against the handle of the weighted pistol she had shoved into her pocket not too long ago. The same pistol that had taken three, four, five lives and counting, and Eve thinks that she hears Villanelle make a snide remark about her body count nearly matching hers despite the shorter time. It was true, she had grown into her monster fairly quickly, after all. 

They were so lethal and explosive, but this ending was so slow and freezing, like the gentle drip of melting ice when springtime came. It was the raindrop before the trickle before the stream before the ocean. It was never ending and all too fast at the same time. Time escaped her, she could only think in seasons, in what the trees looked like from the hot arid air of the summer to the dead of winter. Eve was in the middle of autumn. Shedding all of her layers, letting her insides fall out to go dormant as a thin, fragile thing. 

“I can’t,” Villanelle whispers, even as she takes the gun from where Eve nudges at it uselessly with the remains of her hand. Wonders if the assassin will finally follow through on that invisible promise that had almost been scrubbed away through the push and pull of their relationship. 

_I’m going to find the thing you love the most, and I’m going to kill it._

The irony. Eve had always been a pessimist. Except for when it came to Villanelle, apparently. Then it has been copious, unhealthy amounts of optimism—like the pipe dream that either one of them were going to make it alive. Or, even more far-fetched, have a happy ending. 

Consuming one another took the form of overwhelming amounts of red. 

Villanelle looks at her with the same intense gaze she imagines all of her victims get, but maybe with more purpose. Perhaps the assassin was trying to disengage herself in these final moments, was trying to usher every utterance of _’I love you’_ , every sweet press of lips, every gentle cradling of her hands into a deep dark corner of her mind to covet to herself when she would be alone in the dark night. 

When she would be alone and without Eve. 

And fuck if Eve didn’t want it to end like this, but she was growing cold and the steps were getting closer and if _one_ person was going to get out of this it was going to be _her._ They said that life plays out like a movie in the final moments of your life but all Eve could really focus on were the motes of dust clinging to Villanelle’s eyelashes. She saw a blinding smile and heard the echoing of a high-pitched laugh that rang like bells. She felt a warm touch, couldn’t distinguish if it was here in the moment or from a vivid memory of months ago. 

“You can,” Eve confirms, nearly cracks her whole body in half in the effort it takes to press a single, bloody kiss to the assassin’s lips. It was the warmest thing she had felt since laying down on the bathroom floor. _Adieu, Cherie._ Her eyes stay wide open while Villanelle’s drift shut, a single tear pushing its way out from under her eyelid and dripping into Eve’s open palm in her lap. 

The footsteps have gone quiet. They were here. 

“Not now,” Villanelle whispers tearfully against her lips. She doesn’t dare move a single muscle aside from bringing both hands to the sides of Eve’s face. Her gaze bores into Eve’s. She maps out the flecks of dark in the brown of her eyes. She counts her eyelashes, even though she already knew that there were exactly 28. Their foreheads meet and their noses brush together and for a while, they stay like that on the floor of the safe house bathroom. 

Two shots ring out. Everything is quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> completed as part of a request from queenmaj!
> 
> 1\. breaking the kiss to say something, staying so close that you’re murmuring into each other’s mouths  
> 8\. being unable to open their eyes for a few moments afterwards 
> 
> I’M SORRY!!!!!!   
> i wrote this really fast while i was inspired   
> @topeve on tumblr.


End file.
